Who Else Wants To Use Their Pain to Live Their Divine Purpose?
June 3, 2008 by CK Reyes
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Debbie Ford invited me to be her guest at the April 2007 Shadow Process. Each time I have assisted or participated in this transformational work I got a piece of myself back that I didn’t even know was missing. In her book, The Secret of the Shadow, Debbie talks about our unique recipes. She shared the exercise with us at the workshop and I want you to share with you what I got out of it.
What are the top few things that you believe you could have done without? Did you go through a divorce, and you think you shouldn’t have? Did your parents split up devastate you? Were you fired from a job you hated anyway? Were you molested as a child? Did your business partner screw you out of millions?
Have you been afraid to open your heart? Not only to your friends, family, a mate, but to yourself and your dreams? Do you let your pain keep you stuck in the patterns of the past? Are you ready to use your pain to move you powerfully into a life you love?
What if you knew that the very incidents that give you the most pain have the most valuable lessons and gifts and provide the DNA, so to speak, to give you exactly what you want in life? Would you look at your pain differently? Would you give up your blame and excuses and search for the gifts?
Think about it. And then think about it some more.
How did you learn compassion? or generosity? Where did you get your integrity? or your intolerance for bully’s? How did you come to your dedication? or your loyalty?
The reason for our pain is to open the door for our evolution. Identify the top 5 most painful events in your life and then see if you can identify the wisdom…the gifts…the purpose of your pain… Are these the events that make you who you are today? How can you be grateful for what has happened in your life?
The top couple things for me are:
- A mom who left at least 3 times without saying goodbye and never crying over it as a child. (I recently grieved this event and found the wisdom.)
- Being sexually abused as a child.
What could I have learned from these incidents? Mistrust or trust? Is it a choice? What could be the gifts? My top gifts are compassion, empowerment, and non-judgmental holding of humanity. Can you see how these gifts might have been born?
What is your pain? Extract the wisdom from your experiences so you can use it today for the greater good of us all. We need your gifts… What if this is where your life purpose stems from… Perhaps the circumstances of your life can propel you into a perspective that helps lots of people…
Are you living too small? If you are not using your pain, your pain is using you and you are limited in what you have been able to share with the world. The pain you have endured is for a reason and it is to help many more people than you have. Don’t keep it to yourself. What is your purpose? Perhaps it is to love…. Yes, what if that is all… Could your love change the world? It certainly could change your world if you loved yourself. And if you love yourself you will show up in the world differently than you have. Loving yourself will send ripples out touching people you will never meet. Yes, I believe we are all connected.
How can you use your pain? Do you know? Do you need help seeing it? Here are some things you can do to see it more clearly: read The Secret of the Shadow, call me for a session (complimentary of course), meditate on this and then journal. Make a commitment to extract the wisdom from your pain and to make a difference in the world.
How do we live a life of passion? No guilt, no shame, no blame, or excuses. Only gratitude and wisdom. I have learned a lot from my pain. What have you learned?
Maybe you can see your passion and purpose if you think about what you would be doing right now if no one were watching. What is it that you would be doing if you didn’t think you should be doing what you are doing? What is it that you would be doing if you weren’t blaming the people for hurting you and “breaking” you? Maybe you could find some clues in these questions… Let me know….
If you are further along your path than I am giving you credit, how can you live you purpose even more fully? What do you need to give up or let go of? Who do you need to stop blaming? What excuses do you need to give up to go even deeper? What if no matter where you are on your path, you were living too small? Don’t discount where you are, but do ask: what is your next evolutionary step?
Written by CK Reyes - CK is a Life Coach, Facilitator and Cheerleader of your Wildest Dreams! Contact CK from the tab above or leave your comment below.
View Michelle Vandepas's profile
I started blogging a year ago on June 1 to fulfill my life purpose of making something positive come out of my childhood of incest and family alcoholism issues. I wanted to reach out to others in pain to let them know that there is a way out of the abuse and to give others hope of a better life. It has been a wonderful year of continuing to deal with my own issues as my writing has surprised me with what has come up for me to cleanse and release. It has been a wonderful year of making internet friends and discovering blogs like this one that also give hope and shine light on the darkness of the world. Both of you with your articles are doing a great job of living your purpose and helping others to do that same.
What gifts came out of the incest for me? I have developed courage, compassion, a voice that can help others. I have the ability to recognise other incest survivors usually before they tell me. I also recognise possible abusers. I have learned to trust myself and others and to follow my intuition. It has been a glorious year of growth for me.
Patricia - Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworkers last blog post..Facing My Fears And How That Changed My Life
Patricia, It is interesting how we can learn from our past.. I find it liberating….. until I fall into a depression, then I forget to stay in the present and have to work to get back into the NOW… That is the lesson for all of us. To stay in the present, not the past. Easy to say, harder to live sometimes.
It does take courage to speak about your childhood issues and make them public. I have noticed that when we share, others feel connected–we aren’t alone! Never were. How do you view the trauma of the abuse today? I know you have done a lot of healing and work around this issue or you wouldn’t be able to talk about it… I guess what I am asking is: What would you say to someone who couldn’t see the gifts that are embedded in their pain? How might you help them see that there was a purpose to what happened? I think that many of us think there was nothing good that came from our trauma, and then we are so tied to being a victim that we don’t even try to extract the wisdom. What do you think? What is the biggest vision you have for using your pain to heal the world?
CKs last blog post..Who Else Wants To Use Their Pain to Live Their Divine Purpose?
My biggest vision for using my writings to heal the world would be that there would be enough awareness that abuse in all forms would be spotted and stopped. Realistically, I don’t see that happening any time soon. Many of us are still working off karma from other lives. I want mine to be finished and only good karma left when I leave this lifetime.
By sharing my pain and recovery, I hope to give others the awareness that no one has to continue to live in this pain of abuse and betrayal. I openly acknowledge that my parents have been my greatest teachers. When I was first told that I agreed to all of the abuse before I was born and that my dad agreed to be one of the instruments of that abuse, I didn’t believe it and didn’t want to hear it. Now, I do believe it and I can thank both of my parents for the parts that they chose to play. We all chose difficult parts and it was necessary for our evolution. A friend once told me that I wouldn’t have evolved so far or so fast in this lifetime without the challenge of the incest and alcoholism in my family. I do recognise that I would be a totally different person without the challenges of the abuse. I might not be as strong or as compassionate as I am today. It helps that I have always made attempts to look at the broader picture of life rather than just my side of my story. I have always been curious as to why people do the things that they do. I have also been blessed to have many wise people come into my life at different times who have helped me when I needed the guidance or a different view point of the situation.
You asked, “How might you help them see that there was a purpose to what happened?” I believe that nothing happens without a reason. I always make an attempt to find that reason. I believe that every action has a purpose. How can I convince others of that truth? I can’t until they are ready to see. For many years, I wasn’t ready to hear any of what I have said in this comment. Timing is everything. I had to exhaust doing everything else before I found what really worked for me. Adult Children of Alcoholics and Al-Anon meetings and professional counseling helped me. By the time that I found them, I was ready to do the work. My hope is that by sharing my own experience, others will see something that might work for them. Teaching by example is the style of teaching that I choose to use. In doing this, I sometimes find areas of my own that I still feel pain about and need to work more on my own healing. Have I answered your question?
Patricia - Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworkers last blog post..Facing My Fears And How That Changed My Life
Patricia,
In all that you say, there is one important distinction that I want to make. We don’t cause others to do what they do. I believe that with the belief of Karmic threads we tend to think that we caused the abuse that was inflicted upon us. I do not hold that belief. It was not our fault that someone else made a choice to abuse. We did not deserve the abuse. There is nothing that we could have done that would make me believe that we deserved to be abused. No matter what. This distinction is important to me because I see people blaming themselves for where they are and staying in a victim mentality long past its benefit. Our power initializes when we cease to blame–even ourselves. Without blame we can take responsibility for how we react to the abuse. We can choose to remain a victim our whole lives–even inflicting pain on others or we can choose to extract the wisdom and use what we have learned for the greater good of all. We can choose to live dis-empowered lives because of what we have experienced or we can choose to become empowered by our experiences. Our lives are made up of meanings that we have attached to experiences. It would serve us if we explored various meanings and then chose an empowering meaning that gave us the freedom to live our lives exactly as we want to.
Hi CK,
I believe we can learn from our pain and that we develop strengths in dealing with appalling situations. I believe that we can learn more easily in a supportive and fear-free environment. I think contemplating our pain and what we learned from it is important. And thankyou for writing so personally on something so important.
My purpose: to shed light. I hope I do this via my blog.
I had a fairly benign childhood, free of abuse and incest addictions, thankfully. From my (less intense) pains I’ve learned that it is what is most personal that is most universal. If people didn’t understand me I’d try to explain using ways of thinking or systems, I learned that it was speaking about what is most personal that communicates - as you have done here.
CK, if you read my blog, you will know that I am very much against ever blaming the victim for the abuse. That was my biggest fear as a child and young adult. That was the fear that kept me silent until I was 38 years old.
What I am responsible for is my reaction to the abuse. I can’t change the past or the fact that the abuse happened to me. What I can change is my stance as a victim. Today I refuse to be a victim. Some people are never strong enough or courageous enough to come out of the victim mode. They often aren’t even aware that they have choices. Al-Anon taught me that I had choices. Being a victim or not being a victim is just one of those choices.
Blaming myself for the incest kept me stuck in the abuse. I wrote an article to discuss my thoughts on that topic which you will find at http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/01/blame-keeps-you-stuck-incest-may-be.html .
There is nothing that can make me angry quicker than hearing someone say, “Well, she deserved what she got. She asked for it. She dressed too sexy for her own good. A man can’t be responsible for what he does when she’s looking for it.” That is bull. Even a prostitute has the right to say no. A child may say yes because she doesn’t know that there are any other choices. Incest is never the child’s fault. How a person dresses or acts does not mean that they are asking to be abused. That is a lie that the abuser tells themselves to make their actions ok in their mind. There is nothing in the world that makes abuse ok on any level.
I believe that we all have the choice to be empowered or dis-empowered by our experiences. I choose empowerment. I agree with your distinction.
Patricia - Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworkers last blog post..Facing My Fears And How That Changed My Life
This is an incredible discussion.
One thing that has helped me in dealing with abuse in my childhood is A Course In Miracles.
I came to realize -
The abuser does things not against us but because they feel it will make them feel better. Somehow.
An extreme example is -
Jeffrey Dahlmer killed all those boys (and ate them) because as some deep level, he thought it would make him feel better.
This is hard to swallow but a different viewpoint.
Patricia’s blog is a public service. Nobody talks about incest. And the worst part is that the child involved feels as though he or she caused it - provoked it - was not good enough. Otherwise, why would this have happened? Especially if it was abuse from an important person in our lives.
They go over and over in their minds - did I encourage this in some way? Did I act in a way that made my father - uncle - brother - whoever - feel I welcomed that kind of attention?
Or they think - is this supposed to happen? They look for clues from their friends to see if it is happening to them.
I don’t buy the idea that pain makes you a better person. Not abuse at least. I think it contributes to our continual choice of abusers over and over - because that is the model we have had.
I have chosen abusers my whole life. I think because if I could just make one of them love me, I would be redeemed.
Hi CK, coincidentally, we do talk about the similar things =)
you talk about pain, I talk about failures ^^
i like what you said, instead of blaming/discounting where we are, the pain n mistakes, we can choose to decide what is the next action to go from here.
Thanks CK!
Robert
Robert A. Henrus last blog post..How failures can make you smile
Hello All,
I certainly would like to see my pain put to good use. In some ways it has. Oddly it frees me bit by bit, in very tiny hard-to-see increments. My experience has been a lot of big events where everything crumbles and kind of in non-stop fashion. Also due to early and ongoing abusive dynamics.
I have found myself doing a variety of things with the pieces in the aftermath. Sweeping them under a rug, trying desparately to put them back together, abandoning all attempts, looking for substitution, trying to prove to them they didn’t ‘get me’, allowing it to devastate me, trying to make sense of it all, find the reason why, alot it any purpose other than what it seemed to be. I can’t say with certainty, that even though none of those things sound all that positive, they weren’t exactly what I was meant to be doing.
Like all of us, I have some core things I know have always been with me. One of them is fairness, another, a need to know. Maybe all the many experiences in their various form fulfilling that need to know and the ability to mete out and discern fairness in all things.
Patricia, this is a good discussion. Got here from your recent post.
Barbara,
In reading your comment, I have a few questions for you to contemplate:
What is the wisdom you can extract from your pain?
If you had the faith that everything happened ultimately for you to reach your highest potential, what would you do with the pain? How would you use it? How does it benefit humanity?
If there was one thing you need to know to let the past go, what would that be?
If your faith was speaking, what would it say about the events in your life?
Pain is a great motivator, teacher and friend. The only thing is using it in the right way. I would prefer to have my own company. My job can become tedious and painful. I use this pain to help me work on my blog with more vigor to some day use it to launch my career.
Karl Staib - Your Work Happiness Matterss last blog post..We All Want to Go Where Everyone Knows Our Name
CK I love your question. “What is the wisdom you can extract from your pain?” It implies that the wisdom is definitely present to be extracted. Kind of like when we answer this old standby. What’s good about it?
Patricia I love what you have to say about being responsible for your reaction to the pain. That’s really the bottom line and obviously that is the liberating stance that makes being a victim impossible.